The 23 CIA agents, originally sentenced in November 2009 to five to eight years in prison, had their sentences increased to seven to nine years on appeal in what one of the defence lawyers described as a “shocking blow” for the US.

They were also ordered to pay 1.5 million euros (two million dollars) in damages to the imam and his wife for the 2003 abduction.

Washington has refused to extradite the agents, who all remain at liberty but now risk arrest if they travel to Europe.

Osama Mustafa Hassan, a radical Islamist opposition figure better known as Abu Omar, was snatched from a street in Milan in 2003 in an operation coordinated by the CIA and the Italian military intelligence agency SISMI.

Abu Omar, who enjoyed political asylum in Italy, was then allegedly taken to the Aviano US air base in northeastern Italy, then flown to a US base in Germany, and on to Cairo, where he says he was tortured.

Among the defendants sentenced on Wednesday was Bob Seldon Lady, former head of the CIA station in Milan, whose sentence was increased to nine years from eight. The other 22 agents had their sentences upped from five to seven years.

Guido Meroni, a defence lawyer for six of the 23 agents, said he believed the sentences had been increased because the court had rejected the mitigating circumstances that had led to the original judgement.

“The judges had originally ruled they had just been following orders, but it seems the court of appeals didn’t agree,” he told AFP.

“I am surprised. I didn’t think the sentences would be increased. Of course we will take it to the supreme court,” he added.

The court also acquitted the then head of Italian military intelligence, Nicolo Pollari, and his assistant Marco Mancini, because producing evidence against them would have violated state secrecy rules.

In an earlier hearing on Wednesday, the court ordered a re-trial for three other CIA officers, including the then CIA chief for Italy Jeffrey Castelli, because of irregularities in the appeal procedures.

In the first trial they had benefited from diplomatic immunity and had been acquitted.

Their lawyer, Alessia Sorgato, said the court had taken a hard line against the other agents.

“It’s a shocking blow for the Americans,” she said.

Amnesty International welcomed the judgement, but said that Italy’s role in the affair should also be examined.

“The Italian government and its officials should not be able to use ‘state secrecy’ as a shield to cover up human rights abuse,” said Amnesty’s counter-terrorism specialist Julia Hall.

“The government must engage in a full and fair accountability process even if its official are embarrassed or even vulnerable to criminal charges for their actions,” she added.

“Kidnapping is a crime, not a ‘state secret’.”

The “extraordinary rendition” programme was launched in 2003 by then US president George W. Bush and saw scores of suspects returned to their home countries, some of which were known to use torture.

Abu Omar’s US captors failed to take many standard precautions, notably speaking openly on cell phones, leaving investigators to suspect they had cleared their intentions with Italian intelligence.

Read the source article at the EU Times

THE LEADERSHIP of the United States and their British cohorts have been deceiving the public for more than 100 years. Now yoked to Zionism, they are a deadly combination — and they are also deadly to themselves. (pictured: General Stanley McChrystal)

I don’t think the rest of the world really understands what’s wrong with America.  They see America as this huge bully, killing and maiming millions of people worldwide while America itself is collapsing.  The world is right about that. They also see that most Americans are blind to the aggressive nature of Washington and its wars — not aware of it at all.

Clearly, the world has a suicidal, homicidal, insane entity on the loose. But no one really understands why.

The United States Department of Defense (DOD), as well as the Wall Street bankers, and just about every other corporation in America are no longer cognizant that their actions are self-defeating.  The DOD is no longer protecting its own country. The Federal Reserve is no longer printing money which has any value. Wall Street creates unbelievably complex Ponzi schemes which have no — or a negative — value.  The thing they all have in common is that they themselves don’t understand how their actions are contributing to their own defeat.  There’s a reason for this, and once you know it, it becomes obvious.

The United States of America is suffering from an epidemic of Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a form of autism which some say is caused by too much mercury in vaccines, or other toxins.

Asperger’s victims are capable of highly complex understanding of singular issues (compartmentalized, myopic thinking), but are unable to comprehend the ramifications of their actions in a larger picture. Asperger’s victims are often not cognizant that the tasks they perform are either useless, highly detrimental to themselves, or highly detrimental to others.  Asperger’s victims view the world through a myopic lens of complete self-absorption and are not capable of knowing they are dangerous to themselves or others.  They are also not able to show remorse or true empathy to anyone.

One of the hallmarks of Asperger’s victims is their ability to diagram highly complex issues which they themselves understand — while failing to see that the complex issue so diagrammed is peripheral or useless to the overall job they’re trying to perform. See the diagram below (click for a full-size image) — which was actually part of a presentation on how the US military and NATO can “win” their war of aggression in Afghanistan. (By the way, according to a commenter on National Public Radio today, US troops there are still “pumped up” for their missions by telling them “we” are fighting for vengeance for 9/11 — with which Afghans and the Taliban had precisely nothing to do.)

People capable of such myopic obsession are normally unemployable in real-word businesses, but those with this kind of mentality seem to have found a niche in the American financial, political, and military establishments.

Without self-awareness there is no hope.

Read about the Asperger-like “PowerPoint Rangers” who have come to dominate the junior officer corps in Afghanistan

The United States and their British cohorts have been deceiving the public
>> for more than 100 years.

by Tom Engelhardt

SOMETIMES, it’s the everyday things, the ones that fly below the radar, that matter.

Here, according to Bloomberg News, is part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent testimony on the Afghan War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

“U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be ‘modest, realistic,’ and ‘above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,’ Gates said. ‘The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.'”

Now, in our world, a statement like this seems so obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this part of it: “there must be an Afghan face on this war.” U.S. military and civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005-2006 when things were going really, really wrong in Iraq. It was then commonplace – and no less unremarked upon – for them to urgently suggest that an “Iraqi face” be put on events there.

Evidently back in vogue for a different war, the phrase is revelatory – and oddly blunt. As an image, there’s really only one way to understand it (not that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to “put a face” on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual “face” of the Afghan War – ours – a foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see. It’s hardly surprising that the Secretary of Defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington’s everyday arsenal of words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war.

And yet, make no mistake, this is Empire-speak, American-style. It’s the language – behind which lies a deeper structure of argument and thought – that is essential to Washington’s vision of itself as a planet-straddling goliath. Think of that “Afghan face”/mask, in fact, as part of the flotsam and jetsam that regularly bubbles up from the American imperial unconscious.

Of course, words create realities even though such language, in all its strangeness, essentially passes unnoticed here. Largely uncommented upon, it helps normalize American practices in the world, comfortably shielding us from certain global realities; but it also has the potential to blind us to those realities, which, in perilous times, can be dangerous indeed. So let’s consider just a few entries in what might be thought of as The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak.

War Hidden in Plain Sight: There has recently been much reporting on, and even some debate here about, the efficacy of the Obama administration’s decision to increase the intensity of CIA missile attacks from drone aircraft in what Washington, in a newly coined neologism reflecting a widening war, now calls “Af-Pak” – the Pashtun tribal borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since August 2008, more than 30 such missile attacks have been launched on the Pakistani side of that border against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. The pace of attacks has actually risen since Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, as have casualties from the missile strikes, as well as popular outrage in Pakistan over the attacks.

Thanks to Senator Diane Feinstein, we also know that, despite strong official Pakistani government protests, someone official in that country is doing more than looking the other way while they occur. As the Senator revealed recently, at least some of the CIA’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cruising the skies over Af-Pak are evidently stationed at Pakistani bases. We learned recently as well that American Special Operations units are now regularly making forays inside Pakistan “primarily to gather intelligence”; that a unit of 70 American Special Forces advisors, a “secret task force, overseen by the United States Central Command and Special Operations Command,” is now aiding and training Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps paramilitary troops, again inside Pakistan; and that, despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) these American efforts, the influence of the Pakistani Taliban is actually expanding, even as Pakistan threatens to melt down.

Mystifyingly enough, however, this Pakistani part of the American war in Afghanistan is still referred to in major U.S. papers as a “covert war.” As news about it pours out, who it’s being hidden from is one of those questions no one bothers to ask.

On February 20th, the New York Times‘ Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger typically wrote:

“With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government… Under standard policy for covert operations, the C.I.A. strikes inside Pakistan have not been publicly acknowledged either by the Obama administration or the Bush administration.”

On February 25th, Mazzetti and Helene Cooper reported that new CIA head Leon Panetta essentially bragged to reporters that “the agency’s campaign against militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas was the ‘most effective weapon’ the Obama administration had to combat Al Qaeda’s top leadership… Mr. Panetta stopped short of directly acknowledging the missile strikes, but he said that ‘operational efforts’ focusing on Qaeda leaders had been successful.” Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal reported the next day that Panetta said the attacks are “probably the most effective weapon we have to try to disrupt al Qaeda right now.” She added, “Mr. Obama and National Security Adviser James Jones have strongly endorsed their use, [Panetta] said.”

Uh, covert war? These “covert” “operational efforts” have been front-page news in the Pakistani press for months, they were part of the U.S. presidential campaign debates, and they certainly can’t be a secret for the Pashtuns in those border areas who must see drone aircraft overhead relatively regularly, or experience the missiles arriving in their neighborhoods.

In the U.S., “covert war” has long been a term for wars like the U.S.-backed Contra War against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, which were openly discussed, debated, and often lauded in this country. To a large extent, when aspects of these wars have actually been “covert” – that is, purposely hidden from anyone – it has been from the American public, not the enemies being warred upon. At the very least, however, such language, however threadbare, offers official Washington a kind of “plausible deniability” when it comes to thinking about what kind of an “American face” we present to the world.

Imperial Naming Practices: In our press, anonymous U.S. officials now point with pride to the increasing “precision” and “accuracy” of those drone missile attacks in taking out Taliban or al-Qaeda figures without (supposedly) taking out the tribespeople who live in the same villages or neighboring compounds. Such pieces lend our air war an almost sterile quality. They tend to emphasize the extraordinary lengths to which planners go to avoid “collateral damage.” To many Americans, it must then seem strange, even irrational, that perfectly non-fundamentalist Pakistanis should be quite so outraged about attacks aimed at the world’s worst terrorists.

On the other hand, consider for a moment the names of those drones now regularly in the skies over “Pashtunistan.” These are no less regularly published in our press to no comment at all. The most basic of the armed drones goes by the name of Predator, a moniker which might as well have come directly from those nightmarish sci-fi movies about an alien that feasts on humans. Undoubtedly, however, it was used in the way Col. Michael Steele of the 101st Airborne Division meant it when he exhorted his brigade deploying to Iraq (according to Thomas E. Ricks’ new book The Gamble) to remember: “You’re the predator.”

The Predator drone is armed with “only” two missiles. The more advanced drone, originally called the Predator B, now being deployed to the skies over Af-Pak, has been dubbed the Reaper – as in the Grim Reaper. Now, there’s only one thing such a “hunter-killer UAV” could be reaping, and you know just what that is: lives. It can be armed with up to 14 missiles (or four missiles and two 500-pound bombs), which means it packs quite a deadly wallop.

Oh, by the way, those missiles are named as well. They’re Hellfire missiles. So, if you want to consider the nature of this covert war in terms of names alone: Predators and Reapers are bringing down the fire from some satanic hell upon the peasants, fundamentalist guerrillas, and terrorists of the Af-Pak border regions.

In Washington, when the Af-Pak War is discussed, it’s in the bloodless, bureaucratic language of “global counterinsurgency” or “irregular warfare” (IW), of “soft power,” “hard power,” and “smart power.” But flying over the Pashtun wildlands is the blunt-edged face of predation and death, ready at a moment’s notice to deliver hellfire to those below.

Imperial Arguments: Let’s pursue this just a little further. Faced with rising numbers of civilian casualties from U.S. and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan and an increasingly outraged Afghan public, American officials tend to place the blame for most sky-borne “collateral damage” squarely on the Taliban. As Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen bluntly explained recently, “[T]he enemy hides behind civilians.” Hence, so this Empire-speak argument goes, dead civilians are actually the Taliban’s doing.

U.S. military and civilian spokespeople have long accused Taliban guerrillas of using civilians as “shields,” or even of purposely luring devastating air strikes down on Afghan wedding parties to create civilian casualties and so inflame the sensibilities of rural Afghanistan. This commonplace argument has two key features: a claim that they made us do it (kill civilians) and the implication that the Taliban fighters “hiding” among innocent villagers or wedding revelers are so many cowards, willing to put their fellow Pashtuns at risk rather than come out and fight like men – and, of course, given the firepower arrayed against them, die.

The U.S. media regularly records this argument without reflecting on it. In this country, in fact, the evil of combatants “hiding” among civilians seems so self-evident, especially given the larger evil of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, that no one thinks twice about it.

And yet like so much of Empire-speak on a one-way planet, this argument is distinctly uni-directional. What’s good for the guerrilla goose, so to speak, is inapplicable to the imperial gander. To illustrate, consider the American “pilots” flying those unmanned Predators and Reapers. We don’t know exactly where all of them are (other than not in the drones), but some are certainly at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.

In other words, were the Taliban guerrillas to leave the protection of those civilians and come out into the open, there would be no enemy to fight in the usual sense, not even a predatory one. The pilot firing that Hellfire missile into some Pakistani border village or compound is, after all, using the UAV’s cameras, including by next year a new system hair-raisingly dubbed “Gorgon Stare,” to locate his target and then, via console, as in a single-shooter video game, firing the missile, possibly from many thousands of miles away.

And yet nowhere in our world will you find anyone making the argument that those pilots are in “hiding” like so many cowards. Such a thought seems absurd to us, as it would if it were applied to the F-18 pilots taking off from aircraft carriers off the Afghan coast or the B-1 pilots flying out of unnamed Middle Eastern bases or the Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia. And yet, whatever those pilots may do in Afghan skies, unless they experience a mechanical malfunction, they are in no more danger than if they, too, were somewhere outside Las Vegas. In the last seven years, a few helicopters, but no planes, have gone down in Afghanistan.

When the Afghan mujahedeen fought the Soviets in the 1980s, the CIA supplied them with hand-held Stinger missiles, the most advanced surface-to-air missile in the U.S. arsenal, and they did indeed start knocking Soviet helicopters and planes out of the skies (which proved the beginning of the end for the Russians). The Afghan or Pakistani Taliban or al-Qaeda terrorists have no such capability today, which means, if you think about it, that what we here imagine as an “air war” involves none of the dangers we would normally associate with war. Looked at in another light, those missile strikes and bombings are really one-way acts of slaughter.

The Taliban’s tactics are, of course, the essence of guerrilla warfare, which always involves an asymmetrical battle against more powerful armies and weaponry, and which, if successful, always depends on the ability of the guerrilla to blend into the environment, natural and human, or, as Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong so famously put it, to “swim” in the “sea of the people.”

If you imagine your enemy simply using the villagers of Afghanistan as “shields” or “hiding” like so many cowards among them, you are speaking the language of imperial power but also blinding yourself (or the American public) to the actual realities of the war you’re fighting.

Imperial Jokes: In October 2008, Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, refused to renew the U.S. lease at Manta Air Base, one of at least 761 foreign bases, macro to micro, that the U.S. garrisons worldwide. Correa reportedly said: “We’ll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami – an Ecuadorean base. If there’s no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.”

This qualifies as an anti-imperial joke. The “leftist” president of Ecuador was doing no more than tweaking the nose of goliath. An Ecuadorian base in Miami? Absurd. No one on the planet could take such a suggestion seriously.

On the other hand, when it comes to the U.S. having a major base in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian land that not one in a million Americans has ever heard of, that’s no laughing matter. After all, Washington has been paying $20 million a year in direct rent for the use of that country’s Manas Air Base (and, as indirect rent, another $80 million has gone to various Kyrgyzstani programs). As late as last October, the Pentagon was planning to sink another $100 million into construction at Manas “to expand aircraft parking areas at the base and provide a ‘hot cargo pad’ – an area safe enough to load and unload hazardous and explosive cargo – to be located away from inhabited facilities.” That, however, was when things started to go wrong. Now, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament has voted to expel the U.S. from Manas within six months, a serious blow to our resupply efforts for the Afghan War. More outrageous yet to Washington, the Kyrgyzstanis seem to have done this at the bidding of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has the nerve to want to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence in what used to be the borderlands of the old Soviet Union.

Put in a nutshell, despite the crumbling U.S. economic situation and the rising costs of the Afghan War, we still act as if we live on a one-way planet. Some country demanding a base in the U.S.? That’s a joke or an insult, while the U.S. potentially gaining or losing a base almost anywhere on the planet may be an insult, but it’s never a laughing matter.

Imperial Thought: Recently, to justify those missile attacks in Pakistan, U.S. officials have been leaking details on the program’s “successes” to reporters. Anonymous officials have offered the “possibly wishful estimate” that the CIA “covert war” has led to the deaths (or capture) of 11 of al Qaeda’s top 20 commanders, including, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, “Abu Layth al-Libi, whom U.S. officials described as ‘a rising star’ in the group.”

“Rising star” is such an American phrase, melding as it does imagined terror hierarchies with the lingo of celebrity tabloids. In fact, one problem with Empire-speak, and imperial thought more generally, is the way it prevents imperial officials from imagining a world not in their own image. So it’s not surprising that, despite their best efforts, they regularly conjure up their enemies as a warped version of themselves – hierarchical, overly reliant on leaders, and top heavy.

In the Vietnam era, for instance, American officials spent a remarkable amount of effort sending troops to search for, and planes to bomb, the border sanctuaries of Cambodia and Laos on a fruitless hunt for COSVN (the so-called Central Office for South Vietnam), the supposed nerve center of the communist enemy, aka “the bamboo Pentagon.” Of course, it wasn’t there to be found, except in Washington’s imperial imagination.

In the Af-Pak “theater,” we may be seeing a similar phenomenon. Underpinning the CIA killer-drone program is a belief that the key to combating al-Qaeda (and possibly the Taliban) is destroying its leadership one by one. As key Pakistani officials have tried to explain, the missile attacks, which have indeed killed some al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban figures (as well as whoever was in their vicinity), are distinctly counterproductive. The deaths of those figures in no way compensates for the outrage, the destabilization, the radicalization that the attacks engender in the region. They may, in fact, be functionally strengthening each of those movements.

What it’s hard for Washington to grasp is this: “decapitation,” to use another American imperial term, is not a particularly effective strategy with a decentralized guerrilla or terror organization. The fact is a headless guerrilla movement is nowhere near as brainless or helpless as a headless Washington would be.

Only recently, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez of the New York Times reported that, while top U.S. officials were exhibiting optimism about the effectiveness of the missile strikes, Pakistani officials were pointing to “ominous signs of Al Qaeda’s resilience” and suggesting “that Al Qaeda was replenishing killed fighters and midlevel leaders with less experienced but more hard-core militants, who are considered more dangerous because they have fewer allegiances to local Pakistani tribes… The Pakistani intelligence assessment found that Al Qaeda had adapted to the blows to its command structure by shifting ‘to conduct decentralized operations under small but well-organized regional groups’ within Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Imperial Dreams and Nightmares: Americans have rarely liked to think of themselves as “imperial,” so what is it about Rome in these last years? First, the neocons, in the flush of seeming victory in 2002-2003 began to imagine the U.S. as a “new Rome” (or new British Empire), or as Charles Krauthammer wrote as early as February 2001 in Time magazine, “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.”

All roads on this planet, they were then convinced, led ineluctably to Washington. Now, of course, they visibly don’t, and the imperial bragging about surpassing the Roman or British empires has long since faded away. When it comes to the Afghan War, in fact, those (resupply) “roads” seem to lead, embarrassingly enough, through Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Iran. But the comparison to conquering Rome evidently remains on the brain.

When, for instance, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post recently, drumming up support for the revised, age-of-Obama American mission in Afghanistan, he just couldn’t help starting off with an inspiring tale about the Romans and a small Italian city-state, Locri, that they conquered. As he tells it, the ruler the Romans installed in Locri, a rapacious fellow named Pleminius, proved a looter and a tyrant. And yet, Mullen assures us, the Locrians so believed in “the reputation for equanimity and fairness that Rome had built” that they sent a delegation to the Roman Senate, knowing they could get a hearing, and demanded restitution; and indeed, the tyrant was removed.

Admittedly, this seems a far-fetched analogy to the U.S. in Afghanistan (and don’t for a second mix up Pleminius, that rogue, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, even though the Obama-ites evidently now believe him corrupt and replaceable). Still, as Mullen sees it, the point is: “We don’t always get it right. But like the early Romans, we strive in the end to make it right. We strive to earn trust. And that makes all the difference.”

Mullen is, it seems, the Aesop of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, in his somewhat overheated brain, we evidently remain the conquering (but just) “early” Romans – before, of course, the fatal rot set in.

And then there’s the Washington Post‘s Thomas Ricks, a superb reporter who, in his latest book, gives voice to the views of Centcom Commander David Petraeus. Reflecting on Iraq, where he (like the general) believes we could still be fighting in “2015,” Ricks begins a recent Post piece this way:

“In October 2008, as I was finishing my latest book on the Iraq war, I visited the Roman Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone wall on the south side of the Capitoline Hill and studied the two triumphal arches at either end of the Forum, both commemorating Roman wars in the Middle East… The structures brought home a sad realization: It’s simply unrealistic to believe that the U.S. military will be able to pull out of the Middle East… It was a week when U.S. forces had engaged in combat in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – a string of countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean – following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British.”

With the waning of British power, Ricks continues, it “has been the United States’ turn to take the lead there.” And our turn, as it happens, just isn’t over yet. Evidently that, at least, is the view from our imperial capital and from our military viceroys out on the peripheries.

Honestly, Freud would have loved these guys. They seem to channel the imperial unconscious. Take David Petraeus. For him, too, the duties and dangers of empire evidently weigh heavily on the brain. Like a number of key figures, civilian and military, he has lately begun to issue warnings about Afghanistan’s dangers. As the Washington Post reported, “[Petraeus] suggested that the odds of success were low, given that foreign military powers have historically met with defeat in Afghanistan. ‘Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires,’ he said. ‘We cannot take that history lightly.'”

Of course, he’s worrying about the graveyard aspect of this, but what I find curious – exactly because no one thinks it odd enough to comment on here – is the functional admission in the use of this old adage about Afghanistan that we fall into the category of empires, whether or not in search of a graveyard in which to die.

And he’s not alone in this. Secretary of Defense Gates put the matter similarly recently: “Without the support of the Afghan people, Gates said, the U.S. would simply ‘go the way of every other foreign army that’s ever been in Afghanistan.'”

Imperial Blindness: Think of the above as just a few prospective entries in The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak that will, of course, never be compiled. We’re so used to such language, so inured to it and to the thinking behind it, so used, in fact, to living on a one-way planet in which all roads lead to and from Washington, that it doesn’t seem like a language at all. It’s just part of the unexamined warp and woof of everyday life in a country that still believes it normal to garrison the planet, regularly fight wars halfway across the globe, find triumph or tragedy in the gain or loss of an air base in a country few Americans could locate on a map, and produce military manuals on counterinsurgency warfare the way a do-it-yourself furniture maker would produce instructions for constructing a cabinet from a kit.

We don’t find it strange to have 16 intelligence agencies, some devoted to listening in on, and spying on, the planet, or capable of running “covert wars” in tribal borderlands thousands of miles distant, or of flying unmanned drones over those same borderlands, destroying those who come into camera view. We’re inured to the bizarreness of it all and of the language (and pretensions) that go with it.

If The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak were ever produced, who here would buy it? Who would feel the need to check out what seems like the only reasonable and self-evident language for describing the world? How else, after all, would we operate? How else would any American in a position of authority talk in Washington or Baghdad or Islamabad or Rome?

So it undoubtedly seemed to the Romans, too. And we know what finally happened to their empire and the language that went with it. Such a language plays its role in normalizing the running of an empire. It allows officials (and in our case the media as well) not to see what would be inconvenient to the smooth functioning of such an enormous undertaking. Embedded in its words and phrases is a fierce way of thinking (even if we don’t see it that way), as well as plausible deniability. And in the good times, its uses are obvious.

On the other hand, when the normal ways of empire cease to function well, that same language can suddenly work to blind the imperial custodians – which is, after all, what the foreign policy “team” of the Obama era is – to necessary realities. At a moment when it might be important to grasp what the “American face” in the mirror actually looks like, you can’t see it.

And sometimes what you can’t bring yourself to see can, as now, hurt you.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years…

Read the full article at Russell Means Freedom

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has several times discussed the long history of Afghanistan, referring to the many failed efforts by imperial powers to conquer it. The “tribal” organization of Afghanistan is the bane of empires; they can invade, but they cannot rule. They can disrupt and destroy, but they cannot build anything workable.

Most recently, Gates spoke to Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist. She asked what the U.S. should do to avoid the traps and pitfalls of past imperial projects in Afghanistan. Gates’ reply is fascinating. He said, “If we can re-empower the traditional local centers of authority, the tribal shuras and elders and things like that and put an overlay of human rights on that, isn’t that a step in the right direction?”

Amazing. In the 1980s, the U.S. funded jihadist resistance against the Soviet Union; now the U.S. is fighting jihadist resistance against the United States. As Dowd pointed out, the U.S. is caught in a historical contradiction — having created the very mess it is now trying to clean up.

The really fascinating thing about Gates’ comments, however, is how they shed light on another area of U.S. relations with “tribal” societies: The indigenous peoples of the Americas. The parallels are pretty clear, if we want to admit it. First, there is intervention based on using some elements of tribal societies against other elements and against the enemies of the United States. Then, there is the collapse of traditional governing structures. After that, there is the belated awareness that the traditional structures are needed to maintain social coherence and stability.

An article in the Times, just two days before Dowd’s column, reported the growing problem of gang violence on Pine Ridge. The article said, “5,000 young men from the Oglala Sioux tribe [are] involved with at least 39 gangs on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The gangs are being blamed for an increase in vandalism, theft, violence and fear that is altering the texture of life here and in other parts of American Indian territory.” It’s not only Pine Ridge: “The Navajo Nation in Arizona, for example, has identified 225 gang units, up from 75 in 1997.”

One response, not surprisingly, is a call for more police. That’s like the call for more troops to Afghanistan. But the article noted there are other voices at Pine Ridge: “Even as they seek to bolster policing, Pine Ridge leaders see their best long-term hope for fighting gangs in cultural revival.” The article quotes Melvyn Young Bear, an Oglala cultural liaison: “We’re trying to give an identity back to our youth. They are Lakota, and they have a lot to be proud of.”

One gang member at Pine Ridge told the reporter he “regretted not learning the Sioux language when he was young” and now wondered about his own future. He is “emerging as a tribal spiritual leader, working with youth groups to promote Native traditions.” He said he is participating in Oglala rituals and purifying sweat lodges.

How nice it would be if the United States had not first attacked traditional societies. But that is what happened, in the invasions, allotments, terminations, relocations, and other harmful actions to extend American empire across the lands of indigenous peoples. It is the history of America on this continent and in Afghanistan. The really fascinating thing about Gates’ comments is how they shed light on another area of U.S. relations with ‘tribal’ societies….

That’s the lesson for all indigenous peoples, on whatever continent, invaded by whatever power: spiritual restoration and self-determination.

Peter d’Errico is a consulting attorney on indigenous issues. D’Errico was a staff attorney in Dinebeiina Nahiilna Be Agaditahe Navajo Legal Services from 1968 to 1970. He taught legal studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst until 2002.

Read the full article at the Colorado AIM Web site

Video based on interview with Weber by Daniel Davis, host of the “Beyond 50” program for baby boomers. Produced and edited by Joy Ramos Davis of Beyond 50 Productions. Runtime: 10 minutes.

Who are the previously off-the-radar “militia members” accused in an FBI bomb plot? What is real and what is “black ops” and propaganda?

I HAD NEVER heard of the Hutaree. Seemingly, the Hutaree were a vast conspiracy that wanted to kill police officers as part of a plot to start a race war or something. The FBI supposedly became aware of it when a member of a national news organization passed a tip to Council on American-Islamic Relations which in turn contacted the FBI.

Then raids were staged in several states. Everywhere the Hutaree surrendered peacefully and without incident. One group tried to escape and ran to their contact in the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia, a Muslim ( ! ), but he refused to help them. Before their Web site and computers were seized (by the FBI) and flooded with homosexual pornography: “a member of the Hutaree posted a message online pleading for help and claiming that officials ‘broke into homes and took children and used the tasers on wives … AND my son who is 12.'” (Torturing wives and children is an old Israeli technique and it has been commonly used in the War ion Terrorism: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s 8- and 10-year old sons were captured before he was and the US boasted in Pakistan that they were being tortured. So TASERing children to extract information from their watching parents has, apparently, just become routine.) (Netter, Sarah; Harris, Dan: Christian Militia Raid: Family of Four Allegedly Behind Plot to Ambush Police; Nine Members of the Hutaree Charged With Trying to Blow Up Cops, Court Docs Say; Hutaree: Militia Group Planning to Defend Against Satan. ABC News, March 29, 2010.)

What? One of the Michigan Militia leaders is Muslim? Moreover someone in close contact with the Hutaree, trusted by the Hutaree who believed him trustworthy enough to hide them from the police, and who lived very close to the Hutaree… Indeed, and the Muslim turns out to be an informant for the FBI: “One of the Hutaree members called a Michigan militia leader for assistance Saturday after federal agents had already began their raid, Lackomar [Mike Lackomar, of Michiganmilitia.com] said, but the militia member — who is of Islamic decent and had heard about the threats — declined to offer help. That Michigan militia leader is now working with federal officials to provide information on the Hutaree member for the investigation, Lackomar said Sunday.” (“Chambers, Jennifer; Shepardson, David; Brand-Williams, Oralandar. Seven Arrested In FBI Raids Linked To Christian Militia Group. Detroit News. March 28, 2010.)

Meanwhile, the African-American-Muslim MAS Freedom Foundation, fresh from its DC conference on the rights of Black cop-killers, lauds the FBI for its arrests of the Hutaree and applauds the important [if imaginary] role of the SPLC in fighting the Christian terrorism of the Hutaree. (MAS Freedom Foundation. Press Release: MAS Freedom Expressed Grave Concerns Over Extremist ‘Christian Militia’ Arrests. District of Columbia: MAS Freedom Foundation, March 29, 2010.)

(FBI-Detroit. Press Release: Nine Members of a Militia Group Charged with Seditious Conspiracy and Related Offenses. Detroit: FBI, March 29, 2010.)

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I had never heard of the Hutaree. I went to their rather sad little Web site and found little of interest. Their three document Web pages were very primitive: Hutaree. (1) About Us. N.D., (2) Doctrine of the Hutaree. N.D., and (3) Hutaree Rank System. N.D. The Hutaree documents were not extreme. They were banal and did not advocate attacks on the police. After the mass arrests by the FBI, the Web site would soon be flooded with homosexual pornography: The simplest explanation is that the homosexual pornography was posted by the FBI, emulating a trick they learned when they were trained in Israel.

Every day the Hutaree plot is refined to be marketed for broader audiences. The Oligarchic media, the left, and the Muslims love it. But is is just another canned terrorist incident, like the mildly retarded Black members of the Seas of David in Florida or the Black dopers of the Synagogue Bombers plot in New York, targeting a group of social and political isolates with fantastic, heinous charges that will preclude anyone from seeing them as political victims of a government conspiracy. [Fox News. Ninth Arrest in Alleged Militia Plot to Kill Cops; Seven Men And One Woman Believed To Be Part Of The Michigan-Based Hutaree Militia Were Arrested Over The Weekend In Raids In Michigan, Indiana And Ohio. The Ninth Suspect Was Arrested Monday Night: Mar. 29: Suspects Tied To Hutaree, A Militia That Was Preparing For The Antichrist, Were Charged With Conspiring To Kill Police Officers. Updated March 30, 2010. Fox News, March 30, 2010. [Note: The original Fox News story stated the reason for the arrests was the sale of pipe bombs to FBI undercover agents in a sting and this language could still be found in Google search results that did not reflect the rewriting of the story.]

But there is a new element that is worth noting. In this plot against a dimwitted Christian militia, the FBI used Muslims to target Christians: Muslims to infiltrate the Hutaree (the Muslim militiaman they sought from whom they sought refuge, unsucessfully), Muslims to “sound the alarm” (the Council on American-Islamic Relations, MAS Freedom Foundation, etc.), Muslims to provide intelligence (that same Muslim militiaman cited above has become a major source for the FBI against the Hutaree), and Muslims to applaud the valuable work of the SPLC (MAS Freedom Foundation).

It is not unreasonable to wonder why the Hutaree fugitives thought they could turn to that [crypto?] Muslim militiaman: Did he, for example, provide them with supplies for making pipe bombs and provide them with a contact who wanted to buy pipe bombs? One wonders.

It seems that we have seen the first use of a new government tactic: The use of Muslim militias (the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia is now effectively a Muslim militia, or at least a Muslim-infiltrated militia, something the SPLC would never talk about) as auxiliaries of the FBI and SPLC to entrap and destroy Christian communities. And CBS News blandly states the violent, terrorist Christian militia’s motivation is that they oppose “reform” and “health care reforms,” and predicts that there will be an upsurge of militia violence when “immigration reform” is undertaken later this year, especially because there is an African-American president. (CBS Evening News, March 30, 2010)

Like the Seas of David, the Synagogue Bombing Plotters, and the Branch Davidians, the Hutaree are probably guilty of nothing but stupidity, and yes, they will go to prison for life after terrorism show trials.

This is what America has become.

James Joseph Sanchez, PhD

President, EAIF